I updated the ESL libguide today with a link both to the “Australian Word Map” and the Macquarie Dictionary “Aussie word of the week.” Both of these were mentioned in a recent post in the education.au blog. I have also added the Word Map to the tag cloud of curriculum resources for teacher education.
The Australian Word Map allows users from different regions to add their comments on word variations in different areas. I was confused recently when a friend referred to being “dinked” on a bicycle. Since I can only recall using the much more prosaic “double” we decided that it must have been a regional thing.
The word this week from Aussie word of the week is “bloody”.
The Library has subscription access to quite a few online dictionaries including the Macquarie and the big “multi-volume” Oxford English Dictionary. After logging in the easiest thing to do is bookmark the site and then each time you return it should prompt you for your RMIT University login details.
December 15, 2008 at 4:36 pm |
I remember people giving each other a dinky – South Australian terminology from the 1950s? It basically meant you sat on the parcel carrier over the rear wheel or on the horizontal bar on a boy’s bike. But I also remember “donkey” being used in a similar fashion. I think “dinky” may have come from the type of bicycle.